How To Quickly Make Meta Ads That Actually Perform transcript

but I have a theory about why your ad creative is performing or not performing as well as it is and I think lots of people are doing a poor job generating High performing ad creative because they're thinking about the process of creative development wrong at the Baseline level and so today on the show I'm going to tell you how we develop creative how we think about creative at AJF growth and how I think you should be thinking about it too specifically by thinking about what parts of the creative development process are expensive and should be expensive and what parts are cheap and should be cheap and how you should think about both of those together to make better higher performing creative at more scale for your brand and ultimately have better performance and a better bottom line in the business I'm going to tell you how and why right now I've been thinking a bunch more about creative development and creative production specifically the issue of the cost of creative production and I've been thinking about it in part because of an episode I did with Taylor holiday a couple weeks ago because uh at agf growth we're we're really looking deeply right now into building process around AI there's actually so many AI tools coming out so fast and it's so different than how creative was not that long ago that for an agency to build uh creative processes around the use of AI is actually really hard and I've been thinking a lot about what AI is good at and what AI is not good at I'm gonna have more thoughts on that and probably an episode on that at some point as we continue to develop our our own thoughts but frankly my thoughts on it right now are just not developed enough for me to to say much I think is very useful um what I do think though is that there is a way of thinking broadly about creative that ought to be applied to the use of any tool that you use or or not or any person that is part of your team or not and that is uh basically breaking down the question of where creative development and creative production is expensive and where is it cheap and how should you think about organizing your team relative to those two things okay and let me lay out the big picture thought here first and then I'm going to dive into each one of them the the big idea here that I have is that Crea at least right now and maybe maybe there's AI tools that are going to change this I don't know but I still think at this point that uh basically in any in any way you break this up the actual development of creative ideas and angles is relatively expensive in your business now I don't mean that as a percentage of your p&l I just mean that um as as I guess I guess I mean it as relative to other parts of the creative process okay um well maybe another way of putting it is right now developing good creative ideas creative angles the core messaging of your creative the stuff that I've been talking a lot about recently my episode with Sarah linger from a couple weeks ago thinking about consumer psychology uh thinking about uh thinking about uh like I said the conversation with Taylor as I was sort of kicking around this idea of like can you just fully um sort of bully creative into spending by creating so much of it that something at some point works you just created so much volume uh thinking about all kinds of questions you know some of the convers conversations I've had with Jess Bachman from fire team and and there's this question of like like at what point in the process do you need to think the hardest and work the hardest and what I'm sort of convinced of right now is that at some point in the creation of actual messaging and I'm gonna unpack that more in a minute that part of the process at this point is still relatively expensive and that's actually a good thing it requires Brands to think hard and work hard to do the things that make the biggest impact on your performance the part that's cheap is uh is the execution of the ideas themselves the execution of the angles themselves the production side of things that's the part that is really really cheap and and if you just take that and and run with it which is what I want to do on this episode I think it helps you think really well about how to allocate your time whether you're an agency or an operator or not to have the best creative strategy at the most scale uh on meta and really elsewhere anywhere else that you're you're spending money but especially on meta because the cost of the distribution of creative ideas is so cheap so so let me let me just let me restate it a little bit and then I'll break it down a little bit more okay so developing ideas is expensive executing the ideas is cheap that's the basic idea developing ideas is expensive executing the ideas is cheap and that's the way it should be at least okay so let me go let me go through each one of those and tell you how I get there okay so let's start with this idea of the expensive part developing ideas and angles um so so what do I mean by this I mean actually thinking through how your brand will uniquely communicate with customers in a way that is compelling and selles product what is the core message and at agf growth we would say like what is the concept of the ad what's the basic concept and that would include the Ang again the sort of format those of things what is the concept of the ad um actually doing that is really expensive and that actually is because it actually it starts even earlier than I'm making it sound right now it starts at the level of brand and uh again my conversation with Sarah linger I think was was pretty helpful here and I'm gonna link that um I'm also going to link uh T my episode with Taylor that I just referenced a second ago in the show notes I'm also going to link my episode with Jess Bachman still one of my more um one of my more popular episodes ever uh anyway uh something Sarah said that I think was was helpful in that conversation was essentially that a lot of the conversations around consumer psychology and the positioning of your brand or around consumer psychology is not just about how you position a single ad but actually how you position your whole brand and who you think about that now that is expensive it's expensive on a lot of levels it requires thought work it requires your design and copy uh to be to be considered carefully it requires was thinking about your product Direction your marketing calendar how you approach seasonality in your business if you are really taking a minute if you're really taking time to think through how your brand uh is going to communicate uniquely and and communicate value uniquely to your customer there's a whole bunch of work there and so you have to be thinking uh carefully from the ground up about uh about those kinds of things and uh and once you get to the level of an ad Again Taylor got it the same concept in my conversation with him when you get down to the level of an ad that's really an outworking of the Brand's basic positioning and you know AI is not going to do that for you right there is no super fast uh uh overse you know super fast AI process or reduced price overseas employe actually I mean there could be a reduce reduced price overseas employee in one sense and but you're still going to pay you know even if it's an overseas salary an executive level salary for that basically right so so you know maybe cheaper than in the US to do that overseas and I think people should be thinking about hiring director VP you know Etc level levels of talent maybe even SE level talent in your business overseas depending on how you're structured so in that respect cheaper than doing it in the US but uh but again you're still paying a higher you know somebody for with somebody with a really deep resume somebody who's thought about a hard or you or it's a Founder with Equity or something like that it's expensive you see what I'm saying right forget how you arrange the whole thing you know what I'm saying the time and the hours and the and the real deep consideration of those things costs a bunch of money again maybe even just in the form of time and that is that is the starting place of every ad angle you ever make because this is going to get into your packaging and your product and your bundling and your pricing strategy and the total positioning of the brand all of those things okay and then and then there's another step in again something Taylor's been talking about recently that I've been thinking a ton about which is this this issue of moments so how does that brand create moments in a marketing calendar that are really impressive well that means product releases and collaborations and Partnerships and uh influencer deals and you know depending on the size of your business it could be all kinds of things but again those those require a lot of thoughtfulness and a lot of consideration whatever part of this process you are working on for your business whether it is the more or less expensive part you should be considering Staffing part of it in the Philippines with my friends and more Staffing that's who I'm using for my business and if you're thinking about hiring in the Philippines entirely as virtual assistance at $5 an hour you're thinking about it wrong there is incredible Talent across every part of the e-commerce ecosystem in the Philippines supply chain operations and yes marketing graphic design video editing all those places that you should be pursuing for your business and it is a much lower cost to your Opex than hiring that same talent in the US despite that there's incredible Talent with with people with like really deep Ecommerce rumes who really know what they're doing and will be huge value ads from day one and more Staffing can help you get to them uh because you will pay a a competitive rate in the Philippines for a great quality uh person and a great quality job in your business business you will get access to the best talent there more Staffing will help you find them they will help you recruit train on board do all those things that make it so they are going to be set up for Success uh in your business and it is again as I said how I've worked with my business and how I continue to staff up parts of my business I just had my most recent hire from more Staffing started about a month ago uh so go to Mor staffing.com sorry more Staffing doaf uh to go get started with them now there's even a guarantee so if you hire somebody from Staffing in your business and they don't last for a year in your business because they don't quite work out they will actually replace that employee help you replace that employee for free so uh so go to more staffing.com I sent you get started now and then from there now you get down to the level of AD and that often means starting by thinking deeply about your product and customer one of the reasons that a lot of people's ads don't work very well is that they're not paying very close attention to what their customer actually tells you they care about like just the Classic thing here is just to go read customer reviews and to look when you're reading reviews to go look carefully for like what are people telling you about their lives and about their desires in their lives that your product is meeting what are they telling you about that you know and again there's so much you could say about this for almost any category maybe I just was make something up like a beauty product me if somebody buys a beauty product they probably have some consideration for features and benefits does it go on smooth does it last long does it does it I don't know smell the right way like I don't know I don't use beauty products but like there's that but there's like a deeper layer underneath that really obviously which is that like how you dress yourself present yourself um you know what products you use actually is about how you present yourself and show up in the world to the people around you and that's going to come from from the place of deep desires for a customer and so for your brand to effectively communicate your value to the customer and and to make sure that you can provide value to the right customer you have to be tapped into those things and communicating about those things and that as hard and then that actually makes itself known in the form of words this is why I say it's about ideas when you're when you're developing ad angles you actually have to be able to communicate the idea in the form of words probably before you can ever communicate it visually now there's another version of this right where you just let the customer do it for you you you send your product to a million influencers and creators and you Whit list and you try you know whatever and and I think that's totally a part of of a Brand's messaging strategy but at some point you're going to be creating your own ads and and you are trying to inhabit the voice of your brand in a way that resonates with the customer and as you do that that requires thought workk and effort and so many people I think one of the things and maybe this is my fault right among others like you hear the idea of create more ads and you think that means move really fast on this messaging part of things and just create more ideas and again Maybe Taylor in our conversation that we had a couple weeks ago is right to some degree that like and you could just sort of create enough ideas and angles and variations and stuff at bulk that essentially you hit at some point I don't know that I've actually seen that yet uh and again I'm I'm really trying to be cautious about about that I'm just trying to express some skepticism uh because I think it could happen I think there's there is power in that I understand the logic of that but um even if it does even if it does there's still that step before that at the Brand level um but and right now right now whether you've done that kind of deep thinking about brand or whatever um even if you're just straight up an ad agency developing ads you know I think what I mean which is that the best ads uh have at their core uh messaging that that communicates value in clear and strong and um in uh and attention grabbing ways right clear attent grabbing ways and that's not easy that requires concepting and ideas in a way that is um in in a way that is difficult uh so I I've said this before part of the reason I've said um if if you've listened to or seen any my content my interaction with Jess Bachman from fire team one of the things that they they do that's really different than a lot of creative houses that I see in our space is that they really go and like storyboard full Concepts where they're working through larger ideas about about ads in a way that I think is is doing something different than just like throw a million ideas at the wall and see what sticks now again I just think that I think there's some place for both of those uh in your total media mix but I I I think this notion of of thinking carefully about the messaging really matters thinking carefully about your who your customer is really matters and that's expensive and I think for many Brands right now that are struggling to produce value in their ad accounts this is where the problem actually lies and it may it may be they like they they've they've they've done the medum buying stuff that I talk about that Taylor talks about CTC talks about whatever you know you're running manual bids and and and you've got a a good campaign structure and you're thinking carefully about economics and your business and all those things and you run ad after ad after ad and you can't figure out why you're not getting more scale well it's possible that this this is the problem that you've actually tried to make the whole thing cheap and fast and you need to slow down a little on thinking more carefully about your messaging and and the how-to that I see here the best step that I take is I look really carefully at reviews like I said and I try and I spent real time on this and I think through like you know questions like are customers expressing that they previously used a different product and now they use this did that other product work or not if it didn't work Why didn't it work what are they saying was the problem with it how many customers are expressing that that is the issue you know are customers telling you anything deeper about their desires did they tell you I came in expecting X and and it was delivered to me you know in this uh are they telling you about how your product fits or feels or something because if if it does fit or feel or look a certain way and they're telling you that specific thing what they're telling you is not just about your product but what they're telling you about was their expectation of your category and of your product and so then you want to turn around and communicate that to other people like an example I've talked about maybe at some point here is selling jumpsuits uh mixed by nazrin um and that client that I've worked with for a long time right not that we've like completely blown up that business or anything like that we've had success at times by just showing customers more about uh the details of the fit of a jumpsuit because what we learned from hearing people talk was that uh many customers had very specific concerns about how jumpsuits fit and so we wanted to address those in the ad level and what what a customer's telling you at that point and now that's a very feature benefit kind of thing but what a customer's telling you at that point is they have an expectation of your product in your category and you need to speak to that as clearly as possible and yeah you can just throw a million ideas at the wall and and certainly in apparel sometimes that really works right and um but but at the same time there's something deeper going on here where if you can actually get into the mind of the customer and then think carefully about how to communicate you could do really well now I'll say at this point this is where my ads typically all come out very direct and clear if you've listened I mean my ads sound like my podcasts a lot of time in a lot of ways where I have an idea and I am doing my very best to think about how do I communicate that idea as clearly as possible and you know within some time constraint how do I do that as well as I possibly can well uh that's basically what my ad sound like like I'm trying to be direct give an analogy if I need to give a reference point if I need to but be as direct and clear as possible while grabbing attention with a hook okay so that part of the process is expensive it takes time it takes effort it takes thoughtfulness in my view and uh and uh and so much of the time it takes somebody who can think and articulate in terms of actual words first and then design and other concepting you know format all that stuff video editing all comes Downstream from how do you communicate this idea better what visuals can we use to communicate it better right um what arrangement of the text can we use to communicate it better U what various hooks can we use to communicate it better and this actually that that phrase various hooks gets me into part two of this which is the cheap part okay the cheap part that I said is uh is executing the ideas and here's what I mean by Cheap uh what I mean is you can generate so many variations of an ad in so little time after you have the concept done so just the other day I I created ads for a client okay and I had um I had four Concepts okay I wrote those Concepts out in about an hour an hour and a half uh right uh and those Concepts also came from a couple hours before that of research around products around seeing what other ads had worked around reading reviews all those things and and so I I had spent a lot of time you know a few hours at least really thinking through basically what turned into three or four Concepts ad Concepts okay uh and the vast majority let's say I put let's say I put four hours into that okay just me just me uh we'll call it we'll call it three three hours okay just me before it gets to any editors before it gets to any other media buyers anybody else who's who's coming up with ideas in here I put three hours into thinking through these now these are all still images too so when I tell you that I about the next part just factor that in because still images just by definition have less copy less text and require a little less time to to make okay so uh I came up with uh what is essentially uh I think I don't remember if it was three or four still image Concepts then in the process of writing out headlines and body copy and you know short body copy because again it's still images as in the process of writing those out from there I wrote I I I went and looked at imagery that was available to me and I wrote enough headlines variations to where the final combination of those two things produced out of three or four Concepts 210 ads okay and it's because I had multiple images for each concept multiple headlines for each one and when you did all that sort of multiply them all together you combine them all up and did that and I will tell you of the three hours it took me to develop that probably two hours was like research and thinking and working through ideas about uh and then about an hour was writing enough headline and image variations that gave me 210 uh 210 variations so another way of thinking about it is that I put a half an hour into and the concepts were kind of related to each other so I put like a half an hour 40 minutes into each concept and then from there uh I probably wrote was like four Concepts let's call it a half an hour each one half an hour per concept and then I wrote from there uh enough headlines to create like I said 210 ads new sponsor and I am thrilled to tell you about it because if you know my show 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scale that is unparalleled in the space in part because formont is not just in my opinion the very best software for this in the world it is also a service business so you will get paired with an account manager who will guide you through give you access to all the successful tests they have run before for other brands so that you have the knowledge of running like hundreds of ab tests across all kinds of Brands across all kinds of spend levels you get access to that knowledge so you can be guided in your process of developing High converting landing pages and high converting funnels uh much faster than if you did it yourself I know this because I started working with Vermont with one of my clients and very very very quickly within about a month of of doing the kind of working I'm talking about in this exact show all the way through the funnel we saw our spend go up somewhere between 50% and uh and 100% like in the first month right away it was uh it's been really good Vermont was not the entirety of that but it was a core part of the strategy that happened I became a Believer right away and now you're hearing them on this show go to fromont commerce.com get a conversation started uh if you are especially in sort of the mid seven figure approaching eight figures and anywhere above that and landing pages or any serious part of your strategy you need to talk to Vermont about them becoming a core part of how you are making that happen like I said unparalleled scale uh and speed for doing that I think with my client we've launched like 20 landing pages in the first month it's unbelievable uh so go check that out right now from notc commerce.com tell them I sent you why do I say that because now now designers had to go edit those variations but they move fast man they know we've got process dialed in now to move that really really fast and be and here's the key thing what those little variations are is like I would have an idea for a headline and I was like ah do I want to phrase it like a or like b or like C and every time in my creative process I have that thought I I don't pick I write all three of them down because I could be wrong about the way headline a versus headline B versus headline C resonates with the customer I could be wrong and so I'm just going to try and express it all three different ways sometimes more direct sometimes Less Direct sometimes with analogy sometimes without analogy sometimes directly referencing a comparison product sometimes referencing a comparison category like just playing with a million different ideas okay and I go and write that and I and I purposefully don't edit much I just create variations and that is the part that is extremely cheap because once you've created and the tools are getting better for this all the time once you've created the basic outline of the image and the basic design of the steel image what the sort of template of the image is going to look like the variations are just no problem the variations are just no problem and so you can create them in scale and so that's the part that you should be thinking about how do I do this as fast as possible and how do I do this at as much scale and as cheaply as possible because that allows you to then go and take an idea or an angle and test it really really aggressively without having to worry so much about getting the execution exactly perfect now if you take that concept and you plug it into the fact the distribution of those 210 ads is hilariously cheap then you really see how the whole thing works together because if you're running manual bids for all your creative tests now at the actual creative level I don't have to make creative choices I can let the machine learning sort out and the algorithm sort out which ones of these are actually best I can just work within a concept and then and then let the like individual little execution varieties get worked out I'll launch them all with co uh bid caps and T targets and those sorts of things meta will scale the winners it will spend very very little money on the losers and ultimately my my cost remains again extremely cheap on the execution of the ideas that's the crucial idea that's the crucial idea so the concept takes some time and oftentimes people need to invest more there um but the actual variations don't an analogy I like to think of for this is how pharmaceutical companies work uh right pharmaceutical companies the developing pill number one is extremely expensive there's all this research and all this effort and FDA consideration and trials and whatever all you know all highly paid scientists doing doing serious scientific work to develop a new drug right and so pill number one costs a huge amount of money to make but once you've made pill number one pill number two is just a manufacturing issue and so pill number two is like three cents you know I don't know I don't know how much right but like extremely cheap so what's the cost of the whole thing well it's more expensive than pill number two looks it's not just a matter of the cogs that go into producing the output there's some thought work that has to go in at the top level and I think many d2c Brands fail in their creative because they they conflate those two moments they're thinking they're thinking in terms of either number either and they they do it both ways they they create one version of an ad and they don't know that if they just made one little tweak so they just do the expensive part and they don't have process set up so that one little tweak to the hook or something like that you know could could actually make it go so much cheaper all you were was like an upload away from from making an ad work because you just lost people on the hook and and if you would just create a process so that from the start you could launch a lot of variations of One Core idea you would give yourself a much better chance of success and then a lot of other brands Miss because they treat the whole thing like the cheap part they don't ever actually do any thinking they don't spend the time and get in a room quietly and just read and think and write and work through ideas and try to play with Concepts uh they just they just go cheap cheapap cheap massive scale massive scale and they don't actually try to push forward and see what's really working what's not and make hypotheses and test these all those things they're just doing everything like it's cheap okay if you can do both of those things right and build your operational process your system your team your use of AI tools whatever to do both of those I think that's the way you're going to create a lot of creative success and you're going to have high performance that's what we try and do with our clients and it's worked really well for us um and and the more I see other brands do the same the more I see them really be successful [Music] oh